If you search for the keywords “program understanding” and “program visualization” in Google Scholar, you’ll see a lot of research on how to visualize and compr

If you search for the keywords “program understanding” and “program visualization” in Google Scholar, you’ll see a lot of research on how to visualize and comprehend systems. Around 2007, one visualization that caught the internet’s attention was CodeCities by M. Lanza, and there is also Moose[1], which is based on Pharo and provides abstractions to query and visualize code bases. But, for some reason, none of these tools catch the attention of the most popular IDEs. I hypothesize that there are major roadblocks to implementing this in a generic and useful way. The first one is the variety of languages, frameworks, and build tools. For example, analyzing a TypeScript+React code base is not the same as analyzing a TypeScript+Vue code base, even when both use TypeScript and the TSC API is very easy to use. The second roadblock is that useful visualizations also depend on the characteristics of your system, and creating them is not easy. Maybe things will change with the addition of AI to analyze code bases, but so far, all the tools I’ve seen are either very niche or very short-lived. [1]: https://moosetechnology.org/ https://moosetechnology.org/